Sunday, August 31, 2014

Mada Masr

Friday, August 29, 2014

The boards of two public universities have now decided to expel any
student who insults or defames President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Following a precedent set by the University of Beni Suef, the board of
Ain Shams University agreed on Thursday to expel any student who insults
Sisi.

Quoted on the privately owned Sada al-Balad news website, vice
president of Ain Shams University, Mohamed al-Toukhi, stated: “The
university shall refer to a disciplinary hearing any student who insults
any symbol of the state, not merely President Sisi.”

"This is not a punitive measure to expel any student at will,” Toukhi claimed.

Students would instead be expelled as soon as the disciplinary board
determined their responsibility for “wronging” state officials with
insults, he added.

In another statement to privately owned newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm,
Toukhi claimed that such insults against state officials are a violation
of university regulations.

On Friday, privately owned Al-Mougaz news website published a critical
response to the new university rules, from the head of the student union
at Zaqaziq University.

Student union president Mohamed Sherbini commented that expulsion for
criticizing Sisi or other state officials “is an injustice against
students.”

Sherbini added that he believed students should only be expelled if
they actively interrupt the academic year, or are found responsible for
destroying university property.

Organized primarily by Islamist-leaning students since the July 3
ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi, a host of protests in and
around university campuses have resulted in arrests of hundreds of
students, along with the deaths and injuries of tens of others during
security crackdowns.

The presidents and boards of several public universities have called on
the Ministry of Interior to deploy police forces both inside and around
campuses to quell opposition student protests.

In statements to state-owned newspaper Al-Akhbar Al-Youm on Friday, the
Minister of Endowments called on universities, especially the Islamic
Al-Azhar University, to remove professors affiliated to or sympathetic
with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

Minister Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa commented that “extremists” and
“affiliates of the terrorist society” must be purged from universities
ahead of the academic year.

Public universities are scheduled to begin their academic year on September 27.

Gomaa added that this should apply to both professors and deans sympathetic to the Brotherhood.

In Al-Masry Al-Youm, Gomaa was quoted as saying that action must be
taken against the group known as “Academics Against the Coup” whose
names and identities are purportedly known to Al-Azhar University’s
board.

Bloomberg

Egyptian officials are investigating three policemen seen in a
Youtube video allegedly posing with the blood-soaked corpse of a man
while laughing and placing a cigarette in his mouth.

Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim ordered the probe, the head
of security in Qalioubiya province, Mahmoud Yosri, said today by phone.

The circulation of the images comes as rights activists and groups such
as New York-based Human Rights Watch say the nation’s security forces
have been using the same abusive tactics employed under ousted President
Hosni Mubarak.

The dead man was a criminal who was killed in an Aug. 26
shootout with police, and the image was filmed at a local hospital where
the suspect had been taken after the incident, Yosri said.

Egypt
has seen a surge in arbitrary arrests, detentions and “harrowing
incidents of torture and deaths in police custody” and a sharp
deterioration in human rights in Egypt in the year since President
Mohamed Mursi was ousted by the army, London-based Amnesty International said July 3.

Last month, a video circulated on social media sites showed a
prisoner lying on the floor and later dying after allegedly being
beaten by security forces in a Cairo district police station.
Egyptian officials have repeatedly denied that the police torture detainees.

Workers across Egypt took to the streets this week to protest against
dire working conditions and the government’s lack of response to their
demands.

On Tuesday, two workers died and another three were hospitalized after
being injured while preparing waste-water drainage networks for housing
projects in the southern Minya town of Samalout.

The prosecution is currently investigating the incident, reported the state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram.

Privately owned media sources have reported that the deaths fueled unrest, but those reports have not appeared in state-owned
media.

Prior to Tuesday’s incident, more than 70 workers at the Samanoud Felt
Company in Gharbiya staged a sit-in with their families at the
state-controlled General Union of Textile Workers. More than 1,100 of
the company’s employees have been left unemployed and unpaid since work
at the factory was halted in May.

A local union committee member, Hesham al-Banna, told Mada Masr that
“we called off our sit-in protest after some 28 hours of being ignored
and locked out of the General Union.”

“We were not able to meet with Abdel Fattah Ibrahim [the union’s
president] and were not given an audience with other officials inside,”
Banna continued.

The protesters — a group including 61 female workers, 12 male workers
and several of their children —“all had to sleep outside on the
sidewalk, awaiting any response or recognition,” he said.

According to Banna, the Samanoud Felt Company “is stalled due to
obstinacy of state administrators, a lack of capital investment and no
spare parts with which to repair machinery.”

However, Ibrahim claimed that “the General Union of Textile Workers is
open to all laborers employed in this industry” in press statements
published in Al-Ahram on Monday and Tuesday.

He refuted Banna’s claims that the general union had shut its doors to the protesting workers.

Furthermore, Ibrahim asserted that the Samanoud Felt Company would be
fully operational by the beginning of September and that overdue wages
would be paid in full by this time.

However, it is not the General Union of Textile Workers which
determines such policies, but rather the Holding Company for Textile
Industries and the Ministry of Investment.

Responding to Ibrahim’s comments, Banna said, “He’s a liar and has no authority to make such statements.”

“We’ve had no wages since May, and prior to that we’d only been paid 60 percent of our total wages,” he added.

Banna said that he had lost faith in Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb’s
Cabinet, describing the prime minister as feloul (a remnant of former
President Hosni Mubarak’s regime). However, Banna did not implicate
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in his complaints.

During the presidential in May, Banna had expressed hope that the
Samanoud Felt Company “would be up and running within two months.” He
actively campaigned for Sisi in the election, believing that he would
champion labor rights.

“The presidency is seeking to salvage the textile industry, but is not
yet able to do so,” said Banna. He concluded, “We demand that the
government respect our humanity. Respect our right to work, to receive
our overdue wages, and to return to work. We are productive workers, not
slaves or beggars.”

Workers at the stalled Tanta Flax and Oils Company were also protesting
this week against the state’s inability or unwillingness to make their
company operational and reinstate its work force.

On Sunday, a delegation of Tanta Flax workers filed an appeal and a
list of grievances with the Ministry of Investment, calling on the
ministry to get the company back on its feet.

The Tanta Flax and Oils Company has been stalled since September 2011,
when an Administrative Court ruling nullified its privatization contract
on the basis that it had been sold for far less than its real market
value.

The same court issued nearly identical rulings in six other similar
cases three years ago. However, most of these companies have not yet
been reincorporated into the public sector.

Worker Gamal Othman told Mada Masr that “until 11 months ago, some 480
workers were being paid their wages, although there has been no
production there for well over two years.”

“Why do the authorities insist on not re-operating our company?” Othman
asked. “Why did the Holding Company for Chemical Industries choose to
incur hefty losses by paying workers their wages while there is no
production? Why doesn’t the Ministry of Investment and the Holding
Company move instead to re-operate the company and generate profits, or
at least cover their expenses?”

“We are in a state of limbo that is being perpetuated by the Holding
Company for Chemical Industries,” Othman argued. “The law is on our
side, but the authorities are not.”

The Tanta Flax workers have scheduled a meeting with the investment
minister next week, during which they hope the ministry will authorize
the company’s re-operation.

Workers from the Nahr al-Khaled Garments Company in the Suez Canal City
of Port Said also launched an open-ended sit-in on Monday.

Hundreds of workers from the garment company are protesting against the
administration’s decision to punitively relocate 14 workers and
independent labor organizers to distant branches of the company.

Egypt’s independent union organizations have expressed solidarity with
these workers and support their right to freely organize their ranks.

Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called on American authorities on
Tuesday to uphold international human rights standards and to respect
protesters’ rights to freedom of assembly in the city of Ferguson,
Missouri.

The comments were made in light of heavy-handed security tactics by
Missouri’s authorities following the police killing of Michael Brown, an
unarmed 18-year-old African American on August 9.

A statement issued
by the Egyptian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Badr Abdel Atty called
on American authorities “to exercise restraint, and respect the rights
of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.”

It was met with skepticism, sarcasm and ridicule on social media networks.

“Laughing not permitted… Egypt calls on America to respect the right of
peaceful assembly in light of protests in
Ferguson,” Abdel Rahman Salah wrote on Twitter.

Another Egyptian Twitter
user commented that if the events in Ferguson were happening in Egypt,
there would be at least 100 fatalities due to the crackdown.

Following the murder of Brown, Missouri’s governor authorized the
deployment of heavily militarized police forces, imposed a state of
emergency and curfews, and gave the green light for the use of smoke and
tear gas canisters against protesters, as well as rubber bullets.

Dozens of arrests have been reported and the National Guard has been
deployed to the city in hopes of quelling unrest and racial tensions.

Abdel Atty’s comments affirmed recommendations by the United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-moon, issued on Monday. In his statement,
published on the UN News Center Website, Moon expressed hope that local
and federal investigations will “shed full light on the killing and
that justice will be done.”

Last year, Egypt banned all forms of public assembly that are critical of the ruling government.

Presidential Decree 107 (2013), the “Law Regulating Right of Assembly,
Processions and Peaceful Protest” strictly limits the freedom to protest
and peaceful assembly, while granting police sweeping powers to
forcefully disperse protests, even those that are officially authorized.

According to this law, the Egyptian police are empowered to use batons,
water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and even live shotgun shells
against protesters. The law also imposes penalties of imprisonment
ranging from two to seven years and/or fines of up to LE300,000 ($US
42,000) for violations.

This year, the anniversary of the armed crackdown on Islamist protest
camps at Rabea al-Adaweya and Nahda squares on August 14, 2013 — which
left hundreds dead (estimates range from 400 to over 1,200) — saw fatal
violence. Egyptian police shot dead at least five civilians protesting
against the regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to mark the
violent dispersals.

On August 11, security authorities at Cairo airport barred
representatives of Human Rights Watch from entering the country. Their
report regarding the August 14 crackdown was denounced and dismissed by
Egypt’s ruling authorities.

A host of mainstream Egyptian TV channels have recently pointed the finger at human rights violations in Ferguson.

Mention has not been made of the scale of fatalities during the August
14 dispersals, the state of emergency and curfew imposed across most of
Egypt for three months, or the over 800 Egyptian civilians killed during
the January 25 uprising of 2011.

*Photo by Virginie Nguyen

_____________

Mada Masr

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

During the US State Department’s daily briefing on Tuesday, Deputy
Spokesperson Mary Harf responded to the recent Egyptian Foreign Affairs
statement regarding the Ferguson protests, saying that the US practices
freedom of expression that isn't upheld with the same respect in Egypt.

Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Badr Abdel Aty had said in a press
conference on Tuesday that Egypt “closely monitors” the protests in
Ferguson and reiterated the United Nation’s calls on the US to exercise
“self-restraint” and “respect the right of assembly and peaceful
expression of opinion.”

Large protests had broken out in Ferguson, Missouri and were met with a
violent police response following the killing of a teenager by a police
officer.

“We here in the United States will put our record for confronting our
problems transparently and openly and honestly up against anyone else’s
in the world. And we, when we have issues here, confront them in that
way, as you’ve seen over the past few days, and we would call on other
countries to do the same. And unfortunately, we haven’t always seen
that, so we’ll keep calling on them to do so,” Harf said in a response
to a question about Egypt’s comment.

Asked whether she believed the Egyptian comment is meant as an answer
to the US criticism of the Egyptian government, Harf continues, “People
are free to say what they’d like. They are free to weigh in on issues.
That’s the beauty of freedom of expression that we hold very dearly here
in the United States. That freedom of expression hasn’t, quite frankly,
been upheld with the same sort of respect in Egypt.”

Social media has responded to the Foreign Ministry’s statement with
sarcasm as Egypt has imposed strict limitations on freedom of assembly
and expression in the past year, issuing a Protest Law that requires a
permit from the Ministry of Interior before assembly and arresting
thousands of demonstrators in the past period, sentencing many to
lengthy jail sentences.

Harf refused the comparison between the situation in Egypt and that in
Ferguson, reiterating the US government’s concern about the human rights
situation in Egypt.

Similarly Ministry of Interior Spokesperson Hany Abdel Latif gave
advice to the US police during a phone interview on Sada al-Balad
station on Tuesday regarding the treatment of protesters.

Abdel Latif urges the US police to negotiate with protesters and
refrain from the use of excessive force. The Egyptian police is
notorious for violence against protesters, as well as for practicing
other forms of human rights violations, such as torture of detainees

International Business Times

August 18, 2014

Gianluca Mezzofiore

Israel has allegedly barred Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch representatives
from entering Gaza, in order to investigate if the Israeli government
and Hamas committed war crimes and human rights violations during the
recent conflict.

Haaretz reported that
employees from both organisations have not been allowed to enter Gaza
since 7 July. The grounds for the ban are that the Erez border crossing,
between Israel and the Gaza Strip, is closed, and that neither group is
included in a list of aid groups issued by the Israeli Ministry of
Social Affairs.

During Operation Protective Edge to journalists, UN employees and
Palestinians in need of medical care, were able to move through the Erez
border crossing.

The Cogat (coordinator of government activity in the territories)
guidelines for the passage of foreigners through the Erez crossing state
that employees of unrecognised organisations – those not registered
with the Social Affairs ministry – "may submit an exceptional request
that will be considered in light of the prevailing policy based on the
political-security situation".

Amnesty 'not an aid organisation'

Amnesty reportedly held talks with Israeli authorities. Israel has
stated that only UN agencies can be registered with the foreign
ministry, and that the human rights group does not "meet the criterion
set" by the Social Affairs ministry for a humanitarian aid organisation.

Palestinians reportedly entered North Sinai through cross-border tunnels with plans to travel to Alexandria and then Europe

Sunday 17 Aug 2014

Egyptian authorities said on Sunday that 17 Palestinians have been
arrested while trying to illegally enter the country in attempts to flee
ongoing violence in the Gaza Strip, state-run news agency MENA
reported.

The Palestinians were arrested after they illegally reached the North
Sinai border town of Al-Arish via underground tunnels with Gaza. They
were headed to the Mediterranean city of Alexandria from where they
intended to illegally cross to Europe, MENA said.

The densely-populated Palestinian territory has been devastated by a
more than month-long assault by Israeli forces that has killed almost
2,000 Palestinians.

The United Nations said 425,000 of the strip's 1.8 million people have been displaced by the war.

Approximately 5 million Palestinian refugees live in UN-run camps in
Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank after they or their
families fled or were displaced during the 1948 war that saw Israel's
founding.

Friday, 08/15/2014

Rania Khalek

Since the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson
police in Missouri last weekend, the people of Ferguson have been
subjected to a military-style crackdown by a squadron of local police
departments dressed like combat soldiers. This has prompted residents to
liken the conditions on the ground in Ferguson to the Israeli military
occupation of Palestine.

And who can blame them?

The dystopian scenes of paramilitary units in camouflage rampaging
through the streets of Ferguson, pointing assault rifles at unarmed
residents and launching tear gas into people’s front yards from behind
armored personnel carriers (APCs), could easily be mistaken for a
Tuesday afternoon in the occupied West Bank.

And it’s no coincidence.

At least two of the four law enforcement agencies
that were deployed in Ferguson up until Thursday evening — the St.
Louis County Police Department and the St. Louis Police Department —
received training from Israeli security forces in recent years.

Brute force

It all started when a yet to be named Ferguson police officer killed
Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. According to witnesses, Brown
was attempting to surrender with his hands up when a Ferguson police
officer emptied his clip into Brown’s body, shooting the teen up to ten times.

For hours police left Brown’s lifeless body sprawled in the street
uncovered as a growing number of residents gathered nearby, demanding
answers from authorities. Police responded by deploying K-9 units and
riot squads to crush the crowd, predictably inciting a riot, which
police used to justify more brute force.

But the people of Ferguson refuse to submit and have mobilized every single day to demand justice for Brown and an end to the racist, undemocratic regime they live under.

“Hands up, don’t shoot” has become their rallying cry, a symbol of Brown in his last moments and what it means to be black in America, where every 28 hours an African-American is killed by a self-styled vigilante, security guard or police officer.

Still, police did not relent, prompting one Ferguson protester to
shout at a row of military-style tactical vehicles, “You gonna shoot us?
Is this the Gaza Strip?”

“Will we as a people rise up like the people of Gaza? Will our
community be bombed like last night with tear gas? That was a terrorist
attack,” remarked another Ferguson protester to The Daily Beast.

Even elected officials weren’t spared. Missouri state Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal was tear gassed
and St. Louis Alderman Antonio French, who had been documenting the
unfolding police repression in Ferguson on social media since just after
Brown’s murder, was arrested.

As the situation spiraled further out of control, Palestinians began tweetingadvice on dealing with tear gas to the people of Ferguson.

Cops become soldiers

Domestic policing in the US has a long and sordid history rooted in
the violent control and subjugation of communities of color, so the
police violence directed at the predominantly black residents of
Ferguson is nothing new.

But the widespread militarization on display in Ferguson is part of a more recent trend
that began three decades ago with the introduction of the disastrous
“war on drugs” and dramatically escalated with the “war on terror” —
leading directly to the counterinsurgency-like tactics deployed against
the people of Ferguson by civilian police officers who more closely
resemble combat soldiers in Afghanistan than domestic cops.

This cop-to-soldier transformation
has been facilitated by the US government through mechanisms like the
Pentagon’s 1033 or military surplus program, which funnels excess
military gear to law enforcement agencies across the country. The
program’s motto: ”From warfighter to crimefighter.”

In 2013 alone, the program showered US police departments with nearly $450 million worth of military equipment.

St. Louis County law enforcement agencies, including the Ferguson Police Department, participate in
this program and have received military-grade rifles, pistols and night
vision equipment in recent years, though it’s unclear if the equipment
is being used in Ferguson now.

As The New York Timesreported
in June, the scaling down of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan means
“former tools of combat — M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and
more — are ending up in local police departments, often with little
public notice.”

“During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police
departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly
200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and
night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and
aircraft,” the newspaper added.

Ferguson police also receive money from the Department of Homeland
Security as part of a grant program that has doled out billions to US
law enforcement agencies to purchase military-style equipment, like the
APCs charging through the streets of Ferguson.

In the last five years alone, Missouri has received nearly $70 million in DHS money for law enforcement related programs.

Emulating apartheid

While there is a wealth of scholarship on police militarization in
the US, there has been little to no examination of the ways Israel’s
security apparatus facilitates it.

Decades of testing and perfecting methods of domination and control
on a captive and disenfranchised Palestinian population has given rise
to a booming “homeland security industry” in Israel that refashions
occupation-style repression for use on marginalized populations in other
parts of the world, including St. Louis.

Under the cover of counterterrorism training, nearly every major
police agency in the United States has traveled to Israel for lessons in
occupation enforcement, a phenomenon that journalist Max Blumenthal
dubbed “the Israelification
of America’s security apparatus.”

Israeli forces and US police
departments are so entrenched that the New York City Police Department
(NYPD) has opened a branch in Tel Aviv.

In 2011, then St. Louis County Police Department chief Timothy Fitch attended the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) National Counter-Terrorism Seminar,
an annual week-long Israeli training camp where US law enforcement
executives “study first hand Israel’s tactics and strategies” directly
from “senior commanders in the Israel National Police, experts from
Israel’s intelligence and security services, and the Israel Defense
Forces,” according to the ADL’s website.

Until Thursday night, the St. Louis County Police Department appeared
to be the largest most militarized and brutish force operating in
Ferguson. “St. Louis County Police” was scrawled across the side of most
of the tactical unit vehicles and appeared on the combat-style uniforms of officers aiming assault rifles at peaceful protesters.

The ADL boasts of sending more than 175 senior US law enforcement
officials from 100 different agencies to the seminar since 2004, which
are “taking the lessons they learned in Israel back to the United
States.”

The ADL is just one of several pro-Israel groups forging close ties
between US cops and Israel’s security and intelligence apparatus.

Another is the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs (JINSA), a neoconservative think tank that claims to have hosted
some 9,500 law enforcement officials in its Law Enforcement Exchange Program (LEEP) since 2004.

LEEP “takes delegations of senior law enforcement executives to
Israel to study methods and observe techniques used in preventing and
reacting to acts of terrorism” and “sponsors conferences within the
United States, bringing Israeli experts before much larger groups of law
enforcement leaders,” according to JINSA’s brochure.

Following nationwide outrage and embarrassment, Missouri Governor Jay
Nixon pulled St. Louis County Police forces out of Ferguson and placed
the Missouri Highway Patrol in charge of policing demonstrators. The St.
Louis Police Department voluntarily removed its officers from
Ferguson.

As a result, Ferguson no longer looks like occupied territory, though the underlying issue, Michael Brown’s murder, has yet to be addressed.

Meanwhile, the scope of Israel’s influence on US law enforcement
remains virtually ignored by the media despite the troubling
implications of emulating an apartheid regime actively engaged in ethnic
cleansing and war crimes.

The culture of racism and impunity that has long plagued American
policing is deadly enough as it is. Adding Israeli-style repression to
an already dangerous mix guarantees disaster.

Cairo (AFP) - At least five
people were killed in sporadic violence in Egypt on Thursday after
Islamists called protests to mark the first anniversary of a police
crackdown that cost the lives of hundreds of demonstrators.

On August 14,
2013, after then army chief and now President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had
removed Egypt's first freely elected Islamist president Mohamed Morsi,
police set upon thousands of Morsi supporters at protest camps in
Cairo's Rabaa al-Adawiya and Nahda squares, leaving hundreds of people
dead.

The assault was "one of
the largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent
history," the New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report
released ahead of Thursday's anniversary.

In Rabaa al-Adawiya at least 817 people were killed, HRW said, calling for investigations into likely "crimes against humanity."

Official estimates say more than 700 people were killed at the two squares on that day.

On
Thursday, attempts by Morsi supporters to demonstrate were swiftly
suppressed, reflecting their dwindling ability to stage protests amid
violent repression that has left more than 1,400 people dead since
Morsi's overthrow in July 2013.

The pro-Morsi Anti-Coup Alliance had called for nationwide rallies under the slogan "We Demand Retribution."

Four people were killed by
gunshots across Cairo when Morsi supporters clashed with riot police and
civilian opponents, a security official said.

Earlier,
a policeman was gunned down in a southern Cairo suburb by unknown
assailants. The interior ministry blamed Morsi supporters for his death.

Police
fired tear gas during clashes with pro-Morsi demonstrators in three
neighbourhoods of the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and in the town
of Kerdasa, southwest of Cairo.

Similar trouble was reported in the Nile Delta province of Sharqiya.

At least 14 people were wounded and around 70 arrested nationwide, security officials and state news agency MENA said.

Security
forces were deployed around Cairo's main squares including Rabaa to
thwart any attempts by pro-Morsi groups to hold rallies.

'NO REGRETS'

In
a conference call on Tuesday, HRW executive director Kenneth Roth said
the Rabaa crackdown was a "widespread systematic attack on civilian
population."

He called for an
investigation into the roles played in the assault by Sisi, Interior
Minister Mohamed Irbrahim and Medhat Menshawy, who led the crackdown.

Hazem al-Beblawi, who was prime minister at that time, brushed off the HRW criticism.

"It was a sad decision yet necessary... I do not have the slightest doubt that what happened was right," Beblawi told AFP.

"No disproportionate force was used... it only took so long because of the vicious resistance (of the protesters)," he added.

The
crackdown was launched after thousands of pro-Morsi supporters refused
to end their sit-ins despite repeated warnings by the authorities.

Qatar-based
cleric Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi, who was born in Egypt and is seen as a
spiritual guide by supporters of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, called for
the prosecution of the "leaders of the military coup" for the
"premeditated massacre" of the protesters.

Qaradawi is himself wanted in Egypt and faces trial in absentia as part of the crackdown on Morsi's supporters.

Gas-rich
Qatar has also given refuge to a number of Brotherhood leaders who fled
Egypt after Morsi's overthrow and has faced persistent criticism from
the new authorities in Cairo.

Sisi
deposed Morsi after millions of people took to the streets demanding
the Islamist's resignation just one year into his rule.

They accused him of monopolising power and ruining an already dilapidated economy.

Sisi
replaced Morsi as president after securing a landslide victory in May
this year in an election in which he faced a single challenger and the
main opposition groups called a boycott.